Linaro Tech Days: Wayland, Weston & Open Source GPU drivers

Mark Filion March 30, 2020

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This week, Daniel Stone and Tomeu Vizoso will be taking part in Linaro Tech Days, a series of technical sessions presented live online via Zoom webinar and streamed on YouTube. These sessions are free to attend and open to the public, however registration is recommended to view full session details, joining instructions, and more.

Wayland and Weston: 8 years of production devices

Wayland and Weston have now been shipping in commercial devices for eight years, since the first set-top box shipped with Wayland and Weston's 0.85 release.

Considered a dramatic and difficult bet at the time, Wayland has in a short time become the de-facto choice across the industry. Not only is it seen everything from set-top boxes to smart TVs to smart watches, but its extensible and flexible nature means that it is even used to support Android applications within Google's ChromeOS, running as a component of the Chromium browser engine. More complex usecases such as remote-display sharing and even VR environments are using Wayland as a building block.

Many of these devices are using the Weston display server, developed alongside the original Wayland implementation. Weston performs a careful balancing act, delivering as much of the capability of the underlying hardware as possible, whilst being uncompromising on quality. Weston's efficient architecture and quality has seen it ship in many cases where reliability and responsiveness are non-negotiable. Thanks to its internal architecture making full use of the hardware's capability, Weston is often used as a vehicle for introducing new features to the upstream graphics stack, as it can be easily adapted to take full advantage of new and more efficient hardware offload functionality.

In this talk, Daniel, a core Wayland developer at Collabora, will share some of the lessons of the last eight years of helping partners and the community successfully ship devices fulfilling Wayland's original promise of 'every frame is perfect', including lessons from what Wayland did well, things that would be very different in Wayland 2.0, and a look to future usecases and challenges for the whole graphics stack. He will also run through some real-life practical examples of closing the gap between prototype and production, using powerful profiling and introspection tools provided in recent versions of Weston.

Open Source GPU Drivers BoF

BoF to discuss the current state of Open Source GPU drivers on ARM and plans for the future. What has happened in 2019 and what is planned for 2020, with updates from multiple teams within the community.

Please visit the Linaro Tech Days website for the full schedule. See you on Zoom or YouTube!